Pico's New VR Headset Beats Meta to the Punch With Glorious Color Passthrough

Bytedance and its subsidiary company Pico have just unveiled a refresh of their popular VR headset, matching the Meta Quest 2 in many respects and exceeding it in others. 

The Pico 4 offers both a standalone and a PC-connected experience, just like the Quest 2, but includes something Meta has still yet to crack: full-color passthrough. In VR terms, passthrough refers to seeing the world around you as you use the device, which comes in handy when avoiding furniture, finding controllers, and just checking out the source of external noise.

Quest 2 only offers an extremely grainy black and white passthrough, which makes it difficult to see what is going on when wearing the headset. The Pico 4 promises to fix this problem with full color and a higher definition. 

Elsewhere, the specs are solid, giving Meta a real run for its money in the standalone VR headset department. The Pico 4 is powered by a Qualcomm XR2 processor, an Adreno 650 GPU, and 8GB of RAM. The battery allows for three hours of use per charge, and each eye display offers better than 4K resolution, at 4,320 x 2,160, with a 105-degree field of view.

The exterior boasts four full-color cameras for positioning and for enabling passthrough and the headset ships with a pair of proprietary vibration-enhanced controllers.

Pico is also working on their own corner of the Metaverse, called Pico Worlds, where users can play games with friends, watch live concerts, and more. 

The Pico 4 with 128GB of storage costs $420, which is just twenty bucks more than the current price of the 64GB Quest 2 model. Pre-orders open next month, and the headset ships on October 18.